This Location of Unknown Possibilities (17 page)

Without further word, Chaz walked into the room. “For you.” He handed Marta a white envelope.

The quiet solemnity bore into Marta, who anticipated a letter of termination: “Attention Professor Spëk: We regret to inform you . . .” The man's face still shone with moisture, she noted, and now smudges here and there of dehydrated red sauce, likely from the over-salted pizza the office had ordered hours earlier, lent him a boyish appeal.

Chaz waited, leaving Marta no chance for a private viewing. She tore open the envelope and withdrew an illustrated birthday card. The caption exclaimed “Redneck Push-Up Bra” in large copper foil letters; in the foreground of the accompanying photograph a buxom woman stood arms akimbo and wore a homemade brassiere of short ripped strips of pewter duct tape. Befitting the cliché, the woman—who in real life would be called trailer trash—scowled, lustily gap-toothed and plastered with makeup that coarsened her in such a way that a career in subsistence prostitution seemed probable. Naturally, her brown hair was bulbous with beer can rollers. She stood in front of the aluminum screen door of a battered mobile home; a lit cigarette protruded from the corner of plum lips. The only item missing: a rolling pin clutched as a weapon.

“I thought of you when I saw it.”

A surreal puzzlement washed over Marta. Here she breathed, perched on the side of a soft mattress in a no-frills motel room late at night after fourteen hours of work at a strange demi-job in a remote location where an odd man had just handed over a bizarre card months from the date on her birth certificate while making a ridiculous and insulting association that she utterly failed to comprehend.

Stalling, Marta pretended to read the card's interior punch line,
Why?
resounding silently.
What possible connection could Chaz have made between this card and her? She tallied its qualities—the stacked levels of crude humour, the woman's pendulous breasts and cartoon Appalachian aesthetic, the overall cheapness—and found no commonality.

“Should I ask?”

“Huh?

“Well, to be honest, this is baffling.” Watching him, she struggled with the degree of tact required and whether to return the offering. “It's not my birthday and that leads me to conclude that you see similarities between me and this, this vulgar stereotype, and . . .”

Chaz pursed his lips but made no move toward an ­explanation.

“Let me put it this way,” Marta continued, eyes on his. “If I gave you a card that, for instance, featured an unattractive computer nerd wearing one of those novelty caps that holds two cans of beer, and then said I was reminded of you, wouldn't you find it just a touch insulting? I mean, what purpose could there be to giving someone a ‘thinking of you' gift card that could only ever be interpreted as an insult? Or am I missing something?”

“Oh, wow. I guess I'm a ‘Don't look a gift horse in the mouth' kinda guy.”

“Well, there's that. I'd say I belong to the ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts' camp.”

“Huh, I thought that saying only applied to life during wartime.” Uncomfortable, he adjusted his cap. “So I get it, Herr Doktor Freud. Your job is all about interpreting layers of symbols and that, so you read into things when there's no reason to.”

“I see. So, the association between Appalachian Annie-Lou here”—like an auctioneer's assistant, she held the card up for a full view—“and me is random and therefore means nothing? You might have just as easily picked a ‘Happy Birthday, Father' card or a ‘Get Well Soon' with a photograph of a Hawaiian sunset or a fuzzy kitten and thought of me?” Though Marta felt no actual ire, a biting tone intruded virally into her sentences. “Remind me to decline an invitation to exchange Christmas presents. Or next time, if there is a next time, that is, you may want to choose something with flowers on it. It's a safe bet; women understand bouquets. Or perhaps there's something I've misunderstood and you can enlighten me? Dadaist humour is a bit much for me to navigate at this hour.”

Chaz started to speak, but stopped, pressing an index finger to his lips. He pried the card and envelope from Marta's fingers and ripped them into chunky confetti while taking histrionic strides backwards and exiting the room. Curious, Marta watched as his clenched hand reappeared and knocked on the frame.

Marta grinned as she realized Chaz's ploy. “Hello?”

“Hey, professor. I was on my way to my room when I noticed your open door. How's it going?” Chaz wore a theatrically false and endearing smile. “Since we didn't have a spare minute to stomp around on set today, I thought we might do that now.
What do you think?”

“Pardon me?” Marta relaxed, admiring the man's effort. “Now? As in, leave my room and stumble around in the dark after completing a fourteen-hour shift?”

“Bingo and bingo. Desert air, cool wind in your hair, a mini road trip, like that old Eagles song: who could say no to that?”

“You can't be serious.”

“C'mon, it'll be fun. I can make you a coffee or something if you need a little pick-me-up.”

“Burning the candles at both ends isn't really my, well,
modus vivendi
.” Marta studied the shifting expressions on Chaz's thrill seeker's face.

“I'm not sure what that means, but, anyway, we'll be back within an hour. I promise it'll be relaxing. You'll sleep better.”

The man's enthusiasm seethed potently. “Why not?” Marta imagined that an alert mind could kick-start spent limbs. “You have some tomato paste on your chin, by the way.”

“I'll be back in ten.” He rubbing his chin with a shirtsleeve. “I need to change out of these clothes.”

“See you then. Shall I?” Marta's gaze drifted toward the paper litter.

“Allow me.”

5
.

W
hen Chaz returned just five minutes later, Marta noticed that he'd traded the day's black jeans for a less faded pair; the black T-shirt featuring yellow lettering, “Bacon is My Fragrance,” led her to conclude he favoured duplicate purchases.

“I'll drive, okay?”

“That's a problem, sorry. The rental agreement's for one driver.”

“Driving is part of my job, so I'm excellent. Bend the rules a bit? Less tiring for you too.”

“This once, alright.” A head-on crash in the dead of night seemed remote.

The breeze that passed through the car grew moister but only slightly cooler and, Marta recognized, Thanksgiving savoury with grass stalks and sagebrush the further they drove from the irrigated orchard flats. Marta peered outside. Except where the twin headlight beams on the highway shone, little detail flourished, only road shoulders and the silhouette of trees—and, later, untended scrubland, choppy lake water, and fenced rolling fields—scarcely discernible from the night sky.

“I read somewhere that for every kilometer one exceeds the speed limit, the probability of an accident rises two-fold,” she said, having read nothing of the kind.

“Really?” Chaz accelerated slightly, features lit and exaggerated by the glowing red console display. “Interesting, I read something by Aldous Huxley once: ‘Who lives longer? The guy who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, something, something, till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. And all the years of the steak guy are lived only in time.' Relax, ma'am, I've never even had a fender bender.”

Marta returned to the barely revealed landscape. Though she could pinpoint her fatigue—muscles heavy, eyes dry, thoughts cluttered—the night cover energized her.

Intently focused on the road's frequent curves, Chaz didn't ask questions or unreel anecdotes. At the crest of a long hill, he slowed, leaning close to the windshield. “We're nearly there. I think so anyway.”

Ordinarily comfortable with silence, Marta now sensed the need for conversation and struggled with a suitable topic. She glanced at the radio, but Chaz had switched it off pulling away from the Star-Lite. Only shop talk, which she hoped to avoid, presented itself.

“So, what are your plans in the industry?” The words sounded flat, perfunctory.

“Let's not talk about work, okay?” he said. “It's depressing, and besides I'm kind of into this drive. My pupils are dilated; I think darkness triggers adrenaline production or something. I'm alert like a jaguar or a blind person, you know what I mean?”

“Yes, we could stop and hunt prey.”

“Or howl at the moon.” He glanced out the side window. “Well, if there was one. Sometime, though, I'll tell you all about my first job in the business, my foot-in-the-door story. At Cine/wurst Adult Studios. We had to pronounce it German-style, Cinevurst. ‘U dollar sign A' was part of the name too, which no one knew how to pronounce. Sounds sleazy, eh?”

“Yes, and definitely more intriguing than mine.” Involving a fatal mid-semester coronary and a suddenly open tenure-stream position, her success story made listeners uncomfortable, as though she'd cheated and personally served the man Mormon Tea to induce cardiac arrest and get ahead. Aside from that, she lacked riveting anecdotes. Graduate school tribulations invited only yawns outside of the ivory tower, Marta knew firsthand. And she felt unprepared for a public launch of her other rite of passage stories. Sadie's adventures in pop culture would remain in cold storage for the time being.

Chaz slowed at a stop sign. “Weird to have this out here in the absolute middle of nowhere.” Other than the immediate road and shoulders of dry tall grasses, they might be in deep space. “A reassuring outpost of law and order, I guess.”

Marta, regretting the weak depth of field, peered outside for the furtive eyes of roving coyotes. Lulled by gentle bumps and turns and contented with the conversational hiatus, she leaned into the door and let drowsy eyes cease their work.

6
.

S
hortly after returning from Sadie's abortive trial-run at the Boise conference, Marta had been struck by a continued restlessness as well as the inadequacy of the explanatory metaphor she'd come to use—Idaho hadn't been a pressure valve, nor she a machine with a noxious buildup of steam. As for “an itch to scratch,” that she kept.
Allowing time for the model description to coalesce, Marta settled on the tried-and-true in the meantime: figuratively, she was all dressed up with nowhere to go.

And while conceding that an appearance as Sadie could be accomplished with ease in an off-the-grid city destination, or, even better, in the vast suburb spillover, the chance that she'd run into a colleague—or student: of the thousands she'd taught, surely restaurants had hired a handful or two—further cemented an already entrenched reluctance. The solution would be longer term, she concluded, paying closer attention to posters in departmental hallways and email announcements for conferences at universities in Trieste and Honolulu. She'd hold Sadie in suspension; and for now, of course, the unavoidable demands of teaching, grading, and publications took precedence.

The Benefit of Risk
, about which she wrote a hostile review that lambasted the author's methodology (“paltry slapped atop abysmal,” the exact wording), would have been remembered as a demoralizing waste of paper if it hadn't sparked the
Holiday Archetype Personality
manuscript—and provided Sadie with temporary new lodgings.

The author's thesis—a loud, dizzying barrage of MBA business-speak about venture capitalism coupled to a simple-minded, fascistic notion of evolutionary triumph—read as laughable drivel, but in its message of risk-taking she'd felt a timely nudge. “Starting Today, Nice Guys Don't Finish Last™,” one of the author's registered motivational speaker refrains, managed to give Marta pause.

Over three months worth of weekends, Marta signed out volumes of well-used
O Magazine
—refusing altogether the purchase of a lone issue—and a complement of miscellaneous self-help and popular psychology bestsellers from the public library. She pored over the lot (amongst their number
Nice Gals Finish Last?
, written by someone with an alleged Ph.D. from a university she'd never heard of, and numerous variation-on-that-theme women's magazine articles about breaking through the glass ceiling), pilfered the flimsy ideas, and redirected them; and she mimicked their tone, vocabulary, and penchant for pithy coinages for use in the extra-curricular project. Marta dabbled at the venture exclusively at home. While not a secret she'd take to the grave, neither did it represent the sort of prize endeavour worth mentioning to colleagues.

Marta realized with surprise that the actual construction—breaking the book into segments, wholesale invention of plausible ideas for a pitiful audience—had not surpassed her abilities. Honing the jocular sales pitch tone became a true hurdle. The visionary's persona required art; being neighbourly, trustworthy, folksy, and yet authoritative in print was no mean accomplishment. Marta persisted, eventually producing an acceptable facsimile. If she sent the manuscript out, months would pass before a reply; at that point and with a letter of unqualified offer, she'd have time to iron the patter smooth.